Bloomberg’s Bullpen: Candidates Debate Its Future

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, center, works from his cubicle surrounded by those of his staff and advisers.

Hiroko Masuike / The New York Times

By MICHAEL BARBARO

March 22, 2013

It is the ultimate symbol of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s management style, borrowed from Wall Street, plunked incongruously into the middle of City Hall and studied by everyone from M.B.A. students to visiting heads of state.

Known, simply, as the Bullpen, it is a warren of about 50 humble cubicles, packed together without privacy in mind, that puts the city’s chief executive within arm’s reach, and a shout’s distance, of his top lieutenants.

The mayor swears by it. Now his would-be successors want to rip it out.

During a forum for mayoral candidates on Thursday night, an unexpectedly bipartisan hostility emerged toward the intimate seating arrangement, which Mr. Bloomberg trumpets as a paragon of communication and cooperation.

The objections were philosophical and practical, serious and playful, betraying much about the men and women who wish to occupy the mayor’s office — or cubicle, as the case may be.

William C. Thompson, a Democrat who as comptroller occupied a large private office, complained that it was impossible for anyone to truly concentrate with so much noise and so few walls.

“It’s a trading desk, let’s be honest,” he said, in a dig at Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire who spent years on Wall Street. “It’s hard to be able to focus and do work in that kind of environment,” Mr. Thompson said.

Joseph J. Lhota, a Republican who worked in the City Hall pre-bullpen, under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, groused that the hyper-accessible layout sent the wrong message to subordinates about who is boss. The cheek-by-jowl desks, he posited, reflected a flawed Bloombergian theory that commissioners are mini-chief executives. “I have a much more centralized approach,” he said. “I believe the mayor is the executive officer.”

He concluded, “I would go back to the old way and go back to the offices.”

Bill de Blasio, a Democratic candidate who is the public advocate and a perennial Bloomberg detractor, said he saw the configuration as an unenviable symptom of the current mayor’s insularity.

“In the bullpen,” Mr. de Blasio said, “the mayor is surrounded by the voices of his inner circle. But he’s been unable to hear the voices of the people.”

He added: “In a funny way, I think it made him more isolated.”

Inside the Georgian corridors of City Hall, the two-century-old grande dame of municipal government, the arrival of the bullpen was greeted, in the fall of 2001, with equal measures of horror and admiration.

It was heralded as government at its most transparent, a place where public accountability was no mere concept but an inescapable, moment-by-moment reality: Mr. Bloomberg could see and hear everyone, and vice versa.

But it was a startling break with tradition — Mr. Bloomberg commandeered the stately former chamber of the Board of Estimate, on the second floor, installing a sea of desks without walls or dividers. He plopped down his own cubicle in the center of the room, just as he had at his private company, Bloomberg LP. He retained the giant, ornate room that had been the office for previous mayors, but used it only for ceremonial events; it has become a de facto museum of Bloomberg memorabilia.

On Friday, speaking in an interview hours after the mayoral forum, Mr. Bloomberg reacted with dismay and disdain to those who had challenged his beloved bullpen.

“If you lock yourself in your office, I don’t think you can be a good executive,” the mayor said, adding that it “makes absolutely no sense to me.”

“I couldn’t feel more strongly about it,” he added.

He said he worried about the health of any company, nonprofit organization or government run by a chief executive who did not use the bullpen model, warning the candidates that by erecting walls they risked stamping out innovation.

“You know, there’s going to be a gatekeeper that is going to be the one that is really running government or the company rather than you, because the gatekeeper is going to decide which ideas get to you,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

He reveled in how widely his format has been copied: Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, and Stanley A. McChrystal, the former United States Army general, have examined it. “A lot of the military is now doing it,” Mr. Bloomberg noted.

Of course, the bullpen has a few devotees in the mayor’s race, though their depth of enthusiasm varied considerably.

The City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, a longtime ally of Mr. Bloomberg who now inhabits a cavernous office on the other side of City Hall, seemed to embrace the format as a cost-saving measure, if not a state of mind.

“I’m not going to spend any money to redo the office,” she said, somewhat lovelessly. Ms. Quinn, a Democratic candidate, joked — sort of — that the arrangement would take a toll on her staff, given her volubility. She mischievously offered pity to whoever sat next to her.

John A. Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes supermarket chain who is modeling his Republican candidacy on Mr. Bloomberg’s, embraced the bullpen without reservation.

He said he had experimented with a similar (though, admittedly, shabbier) setup at his office on the Far West Side of Manhattan, and loved the ability to “have your eye on everyone.”

“If it works for Mike Bloomberg,” he said, “it will probably work for me, too.”

Even those who favor the concept acknowledged they would inevitably need to put their own twist on it, and not necessarily by choice.

Mr. Bloomberg is famous for stocking the kitchenette that overlooks the bullpen with mountains of snacks and soft drinks (diet only), paying for it himself.

John C. Liu, another Democratic candidate who is now the comptroller and a fan of the bullpen, sheepishly volunteered that he would be unable to keep up the practice. “The only thing I can pledge,” he said, “is that every so often I will bring bagels in.”